Mark Lawson on Look Back in Anger | Stage | The Guardian Mark Lawson On May 8 1956, John Osborne's Look Back in Anger premiered at the Royal Court in London. It shocked the theatre world, some acclaiming it as the voice of a new generation, others damning it as a squalid rant. Mark Lawson looks back to the night that changed British theatre 'Impressive and depressing' ... Kenneth Haigh expresses Jimmy Porter's rage in the company of (left to right) Mary Ure, Alan Bates and Helena Hughes, during the first night's performance of Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Friday 31 March 2006 03.37 EST First published on Friday 31 March 2006 03.37 EST Share on Messenger Close In early May 1956, Britain was rehearsing for destruction. A civil defence exercise took place in London and Birmingham, based on the hypothesis that 10-megaton hydrogen bombs had exploded at dawn. The Times reported volunteers with fake blood and burns lying on street corners, waiting to give practice for ambulances and police cars.

Within four months, there would indeed be a war, although it involved not a Russian nuclear attack on the UK but Egypt's seizure of a vital shipping channel. But, between the Eden government's dry-run for atomic apocalypse and its implosion over Suez, the capital's theatre district was shaken by a metaphorical explosion of its own: on May 8, the Royal Court theatre premiered a first play by a 26-year-old actor called John Osborne . The other big London theatrical opening of the week was The House by the Lake, a Christie-ish crime comedy by Hugh Mills about two people trying to kill the same man. The major movie opening was Hitchock's The Trouble With Harry. The literary pages were excited by Angus Wilson's Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. On what was still called the wireless, the BBC Third Programme had just premiered a verse-drama by the poet Louis Macniece, called The Dark Tower. The legend is that Look Back in Anger changed British theatre for ever, replacing stage-sets of Belgravia mansions with a drab Midlands flat, and smart upper-class remarks with the angry anti-establishment rants of its hero, Jimmy Porter.

It's a measure of how unexpected the setting was that, at the first performances, the sight of Alison Porter's ironing-board on stage is said to have drawn from the audience the sort of gasp of surprise otherwise achieved only by the most innovative cinematic special effects. In an era of feel-good theatre (although Rattigan's plays were darker or deeper than their first productions allowed them to be), Look Back in Anger deliberately provoked bad feelings about Britain, the war-time generation and conventional drama. Certainly, the ruling forces of the UK stage seem to have sensed a revolution. The impresario "Binkie" Beaumont, camp baron of the profitable comedy and well-made play and with 40 theatres at his command, walked out of Look Back in Anger at the interval. Terence Rattigan, Beaumont's house dramatist and the author of The Winslow Boy and Separate Tables, tried to follow him but was dissuaded by TC Worsley, theatre critic of the Financial Times.

Even so, when Rattigan left at the end and was asked by a reporter what he thought, he trembled: "I think the writer is trying to say: 'Look how unlike Terence Rattigan I am, Ma!'" It's in the nature of the theatre that even its great events are momentary and vanish. But this particular evening at the Court is even harder to reconstruct than most, because of the melancholy fact that almost no one connected with Look Back in Anger caused much trouble to the pension industry. Osborne was just 65 when he died in 1994. The director, Tony Richardson, had gone three years earlier, aged 63. Mary Ure, who played Alison Porter, though the youngest of the cast, had not even lived until the 20th anniversary, dying in 1975 at 42. George Devine, who accepted the play for the Royal Court, died at 55 in 1966. Even Alan Bates, who played Jimmy's emollient friend Cliff, can no longer give eye-witness testimony; he died three years ago, aged 69.

The first Jimmy Porter, Kenneth Haigh, survives, though he is very unwell. For the most part, the gang was variously lost to smoking, drinking, depression and terrible illnesses. The result of this is to leave historians of the first night dependent on memoirs, and to make the few remaining first-person memories precious. William Gaskill, a young actor at the time, would become a director and run the Royal Court. But in 1956, in his early 20s, he was a friend of Richardson's. The director had shown him a copy before rehearsals and he was "knocked over by it", finding a "passion and freshness, a rhetoric that had gone from theatre: one person speaking directly to the audience". He remembers his first meeting with the writer. Osborne was "raffish, I suppose. An old-fashioned word! I remember him as very charming and flirtatious. I never saw him angry in person; that only came out in the plays." But Gaskill recalls no sense of history on the first night.

Nine years later, when Edward Bond's Saved opened at the Court with a scene of stones being thrown at a child in a pram, there were boos and a feeling of boundaries being crossed. Anger, though, had a much slower impact. The stories of the play's revolutionary effect - such as Beaumont storming out - became celebrated only later. Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot had been staged in August 1955, introducing an unprecedented bleakness of dialogue and design; Bertolt Brecht, a pioneer of political theatre, died in 1956. So, logically, Look Back in Anger, following Beckett and Brecht, cannot have been quite the shock to audiences and critics that the theatrical annals insist. But those challenging dramatists had been Irish and German, and their stage techniques abstract. Osborne wounded the traditionalists much more because he was English and realist. Osborne had more than theoretical experience of the kind of drama his own play helped to replace. His memoir Almost a Gentleman (1991) records his time as an actor in regional repertory theatres, often working, as it happens, for Binkie Beaumont.

Rapidly dissatisfied with acting, he was prone to theatrical pranks. Appearing in an army melodrama, he applied spirit-gum to both sides of his fake moustache so that, after a romantic clinch, the leading actress was left with the facial-hair stuck on her upper-lip. Stage-props were also at risk; a plate of sandwiches for a meal scene would be sabotaged by the addition of what was then called a rubber johnny. Such stunts led to longer gaps between engagements and Osborne began to write, initially verse dramas in the then fashionable style of Christopher Fry. In 1955, already separated from his first wife Pamela Lane, he was living in Hammersmith with a friend called Anthony Creighton. Gossips insisted that the men were lovers, a claim supported by Creighton in an interview before his death, but Osborne and his family have always denied this. Gaskill, who saw them together many times, says now: "I just don't know. Their relationship was anyone's guess." Creighton's own ambitions as a dramatist were initially more advanced than Osborne's. Together, they wrote Epitaph for George Dillon, revived last year in London.

But on May 4 1955, Osborne noted in his pocket diary the start of a solo project: "Began Look Back in Anger." The situation of the central character Jimmy Porter - trapped in a combative marriage in cramped digs - recalled Osborne's own situation with Lane; Porter's torrential monologues about the stasis and decay of Britain were distillations of the playwright's own politics. In late May, Osborne took a small part in a production at Morecambe of Seagulls Over Sorrento, by Hugh Hastings. He finished writing his own play sitting in a deckchair on the beach, looking out at sea. Water would become strangely important to the fortunes of Look Back in Anger. Osborne had persuaded Creighton to spend a legacy from his mother on an old rhine barge, the M/Y Egret, which was moored near Chiswick in west London. Friends always commented that it smelled of cabbage: the barge-mates were experimenting with vegetarianism. Reading on deck a copy of the theatrical paper the Stage, the aspiring writer saw an ad for a new group called the English Stage Company whose director, George Devine, was seeking new plays.

He posted off a script which, after the rejection of possible alternative titles including Man in a Rage and My Blood is a Mile High, was again called Look Back in Anger. On August 12 1955, a grey-haired, breathless man was to be seen approaching the boat, having unwisely rowed out at high tide. This was Devine, who offered Osborne £25 for an option on the Porter play. It would be staged in a season at the Royal Court beginning with The Mulberry Bush, a drama by the then modish novelist Angus Wilson. Devine was nervous about the box-office prospects of the unknown Osborne and so sought to protect his play by scheduling only a short run before two verse dramas by Ronald Duncan, Don Juan and The Death of Satan. The fact that these supposed bankers are now quite forgotten - and that Anger had to be extended when Duncan's unspeakable historical pieces were pulled off after catastrophic reviews - may stand as a warning for theatre managers against making too many assumptions. Hopes for Anger were very low. Dozens of actors turned it down, horrified by its bolshieness.

According to Osborne, one "revered theatre dame" explained her refusal of a part with the view that "it should be thrown into the river and washed out to sea so that it can never be seen again". It is unclear if this was an instinctive insult or if she knew that the writer lived on the Thames. Richardson, hired to direct, recalled in his posthumously published autobiography The Long-Distance Runner (1993) that "rehearsals were terse and a bit glum". Osborne's own phrase was "subdued and unspeculative". One day, Richardson gloomily observed that the third act was sagging; the author wrote a quick song on the bus. Publicity was also considered problematic. George Fearon, press officer for the new season, read the script and summoned its author to a meeting in a pub, where he informed Osborne that he was appalled by the drama and saw no hope of interesting the papers, before offering a psychological summary of the unfortunate author: "I suppose you're really ... an angry young man?" Fearon was, as Osborne recalled, the first to say a phrase that, against the publicist's predictions, was indeed taken up by the papers.

Stage censorship would remain in force in Britain for another 12 years and so LBIA, in common with all scripts at the time, was submitted to the Lord Chamberlain, the royal official historically charged with keeping theatres clean. The response of the Queen's blue pencil was, with hindsight, slightly surprising. CD Heriot - a notably conservative assessor who two years later would dismiss Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party as "an insane and pointless play" - seems, uncharacterisitically, to have got Osborne's point. In March 1956, he reported that "this impressive and depressing new play breaks new psychological ground". He asked for nine changes, including "page 41, cut the homosexual reference" and "page 16, alter reference to 'excessive love-making'", but granted the play a licence and concluded with a summary that would not have disgraced a theatre critic: "The play's interest, in fact, lies in its careful observation of the anteroom of hell." In fact, as it turned out, none of the play's first professional reviewers would be either as insightful or as kind.

In his memoir, Osborne recalls waking fully-clothed and totally hungover in his cold cabin and crossing the river to Mortlake to buy the dailies. Even 35 years on, he omitted to quote them, either because the memory or the research was too much for him. But the overnight verdicts still stand as a warning to critics about how much they can miss. The Times complained of the very detail that would make Osborne celebrated: "The piece consists largely of angry tirades." The Manchester Guardian knew what the play thought it was doing, but didn't think it succeeded: "The author and actors do not persuade us that they 'speak for' a new generation." The London Evening Standard called it "a self-pitying snivel". In his memoir Richardson recalls sitting with Osborne "in the little coffee shop adjoining the theatre and opposite the Sloane Square tube station, frozen in depression, with little belief in our futures". He does not include the savage line that Osborne attributes to him in his own book: "But what on earth did you expect?

You didn't expect them to like it, did you?" But, by the time both wrote their memoirs, Osborne and Richardson were enemies, still festering over issues dating from the movie of Tom Jones they made in 1963. During the first weekend of Look Back in Anger's run, the play was featured on the BBC Third Programme's The Critics, forerunner of subsequent broadcast cultural bust-ups. The programme was presented that week ("conducted", as Radio Times has it) by Sir Gerald Barry, with critics Catherine de la Roche, Lionel Hale, Alan Pryce-Jones and Ivor Brown. Brown led the attack on Anger: "The play's setting - a one-room flat in the Midlands - is unspeakably squalid. It is difficult to believe that a colonel's daughter, brought up with some standards, which we are led to believe Alison is, would have stayed in this sty for a day ..." The chairman cut in to advise listeners that Alison Porter spent most of the play at an ironing board: "I almost had a nervous breakdown waiting for her to iron one pyjama top." But though dismissed by The Critics, Osborne was saved by another sabbath institution.

Kenneth Tynan, a 39-year-old peacock who championed new theatrical writing with a critical prose every bit as original as Osborne's drama, published in the Observer words that have become at least as quoted as any lines in the play: "All the qualities are there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage ... I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger." Tynan did not generally go short of lovers but, in the summer of 1956, he would have been somewhat lonely if he had operated the veto suggested in his review. Even his write-up did not make the production a significant success. The force that lifted the play into the history books would come from an unexpected source. This was a period when theatre feared the competition from television; a second British channel, ITV, had been added the previous year. Somehow, however, the BBC was persuaded to screen a 25-minute extract. These days, such a gesture would be artistically unlikely and indeed legally impossible, amounting to little more than free advertising.

But the chunk, introduced by the artistic grandee Lord Harewood and giving the play a first stamp of establishment approval, did its commercial work, attracting a new audience to Sloane Square. Osborne became a celebrity, pictured in magazines in a Rolls-Royce at London Airport with Mary Ure, whose Mrs Porter had led to her becoming Mrs Osborne. The Royal Court became for 50 years the nursery for British playwrights, incubating David Hare, Christopher Hampton, Caryl Churchill, Roy Williams and many others. The title which Osborne had finally decided upon on Morecambe Beach entered the English language, encouraging, among other tributes, a famous headline about a library strike: Book Lack in Ongar. Oddly, the one thing not to prosper was the play. There have been few major revivals, although Peter Hall plans one in Bath this year and Radio 4 broadcasts a cut-down version tomorrow afternoon. It is perhaps revealing that the piece benefits from this severe trimming, as genuine classics shouldn't. The problem maybe is that the moment of Look Back in Anger's explosion on to Britain's postwar theatrical scene is impossibly lost.

Just as the deaths of all the major participants make the details of the first night hazy, so time has removed the context that made the play shocking. How can we imagine what it was like, in a London caught between nuclear fears and Suez, for an audience that had watched the previous night The House by the Lake by Hugh Mills, to look up from their programmes and find Jimmy Porter raging from the stage? Osborne, John - Drama Online Show results in search John Osborne was born in London in 1929. Before becoming a playwright he worked as a journalist, assistant stage manager and repertory theatre actor. Seeing an advertisement for new plays in The Stage in 1956, Osborne submitted Look Back in Anger. Not only was the play produced, but it was to become considered as the turning point in post-war British theatre. Osborne's protagonist, Jimmy Porter, captured the rebelliousness of an entire post-war generation of 'angry young men'. His other plays include The Entertainer (1957), Luther (1961), Inadmissible Evidence (1964), and A Patriot for Me (1966).

He also wrote two volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991) published together as Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise. His last play, Deja Vu (1991), returns to the characters of Look Back in Anger, over thirty years later. Both Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer were adapted for film, and in 1963 Osborne won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Tom Jones. John Osborne died on 24 December 1994. Copyright © 2017 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Registered in England No. 01984336 Matthew Rhys in ‘Look Back in Anger’ on New York Stage - The New York Times The New York Times Theater |Happy to Mine Hidden Charm in Youthful Anger Search Happy to Mine Hidden Charm in Youthful Anger By LEAH ROZEN Continue reading the main story SALLY FIELD likes the Welsh actor Matthew Rhys, she really likes him. For five seasons, Ms. Field, the Oscar-winning actress, played Nora Walker, mother to Mr.

Rhys’s caustic character, Kevin Walker, a gay lawyer, on the ABC drama “Brothers & Sisters.” “There’s not a doubt in my mind that if the actors on the show had taken a popularity vote to pick the one person you wanted to do all your scenes with and hang out with, Matthew would win hands down,” Ms. Field said in a phone interview. “He is just such a winning, charming soul.” As he prepares to make his New York stage debut, Mr. Rhys will need to deploy all the charm he can to humanize Jimmy Porter, the bellicose antihero of John Osborne’s 1956 play “Look Back in Anger.” The revival of this groundbreaking British drama by the Roundabout Theater Company opens Feb. 2 at the Laura Pels Theater. Osborne was only 26 when his largely autobiographical first play had its premiere in London. He set “Look Back” in a single dingy attic apartment and gave Jimmy, who is working class but has a college education, one splendidly splenetic verbal aria after another to blast his wife, her middle-class family, England and life in general.

Photo Matthew Rhys Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times “What with his flair for introspection, his gift for ribald parody, his excoriating candor, his contempt for ‘phoniness,’ his weakness for soliloquy and his desperate conviction that the time is out of joint, Jimmy Porter is the completest young pup in our literature since ‘Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,’ ” the theater critic Kenneth Tynan wrote in The Observer in 1956. The play spawned an “angry young men” era of movies and plays depicting working- and middle-class blokes frustrated with Britain’s rigid class system in the late 1950s and early ’60s, including a 1959 film version of “Look Back” starring another Welshman, Richard Burton. Continue reading the main story It’s a daunting role. “For Jimmy Porter you need a great actor, but on top of that, he has to be able to turn on a dime from railing about existential crises to saying almost music-hall funny one-liners,” said the director Sam Gold (“Seminar”), who cast Mr. Rhys after he had auditioned several times and then impressed him at a read-through.

“Matthew is really skilled technically, he’s soulful, hyper intelligent and he’s funny.” (At a Roundabout read-through of the play two years ago the Irish actor Cillian Murphy took on Jimmy.) Advertisement Continue reading the main story Both Mr. Rhys and Mr. Gold are hoping that Jimmy’s youthful frustration and free-floating fury will resonate with audiences more than a half century later. To that end, and to deal with dated aspects of the play (a three-act structure and its long-windedness), Mr. Gold has pared down the text and minimized the set. “This is an intimate love story,” Mr. Gold said. “It’s about two young people in a very destructive marriage. It’s about being young and facing the world, the fear and terror of what your life is going to be, and how all those terrors, desires and fears manifest themselves in your relationship.” Over lunch at a restaurant in Manhattan recently Mr. Rhys, 37, said the key to understanding Jimmy and making him sympathetic is to convey how desperately he wants to connect with his wife. “He’s looking for her to see him and hear him and recognize him,” Mr. Rhys said.

“He’s ranting and railing, but he’s trying to break down her walls.” Photo Matthew Rhys, right, with Adam Driver in “Look Back in Anger.” Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times He said he had wanted to play Jimmy since he watched Burton’s movie version as an adolescent. “I remember being struck for the first time by the idea that someone from Wales was on TV,” said Mr. Rhys, who was born and raised in Cardiff, where his parents were special-education teachers. “I sort of became obsessed with him and the movie.” Mr. Rhys is not just another pretty face from Hollywood looking to plump up his résumé with a New York stage credit. Before signing on for “Brothers & Sisters” he spent a decade on London’s stages, where he played Benjamin opposite Kathleen Turner’s Mrs. Robinson in the West End adaptation of “The Graduate” in 2000 and appeared in substantial roles in plays at the National Theater, the Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Mr. Rhys, who has a quick wit and an engaging affability, said he began performing at an early age.

It was just part of a normal Welsh childhood, he said, recalling weekly Bible recitations in church and competing twice yearly at the National Eisteddfod arts festival. “It’s focused on encouraging youth, because the Welsh language is a threatened language, to participate,” he said “So from year dot, I was shoved onto choruses or onstage by my parents. And everyone is.” After high school he trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Following graduation he quickly made a name for himself — the English edition of Glamour magazine dubbed him a “Celtic cutie” — with roles onstage, on television and in small British movies, few of which made it across the Atlantic. He landed the role of Demetrius in “Titus,” a 1999 film version of Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus,” directed by Julie Taymor. A fellow Welshman, Anthony Hopkins, played the title role.

Photo From left, Rob Lowe, Kerris Dorsey, Matthew Rhys and Sally Field on the ABC series “Brothers & Sisters.” Credit Craig Sjodin/ABC “As much as I love Burton, with his voice and the way he devours language, without question Hopkins is the best actor we’ve ever produced,” he said. “He can move me to tears with a look.” Even now Mr. Rhys can quote verbatim advice that Mr. Hopkins offered him during a conversation in Mr. Hopkins’s trailer: “Always be on time. Always know your words. Be bold and greater powers will come to your aid.” In 2006 Mr. Rhys was cast in “Brothers & Sisters,” a job that gave him economic security (he now owns a house in Los Angeles and two horses) and a chance to perfect his American accent. He also directed three episodes, which he said he relished and would like to try again. As for the question he regularly fielded while on the show about whether he himself was gay, Mr.

Rhys mastered an amusingly diplomatic reply: “Only on Sundays at 10 p.m.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story When word came last year that “Brothers & Sisters” had been canceled, Mr. Rhys said, “I did that thing that makes all agents hold their head in their hands: I said, ‘I’d like to go back to the theater now.’” During a meet and greet at the Roundabout while visiting New York late last spring, he learned that a “Look Back in Anger” revival was being planned. “I felt like the old prizefighter given one last shot,” Mr. Rhys said. Rachel Griffiths, who played Mr. Rhys’s older sibling on “Brothers & Sisters” and is currently starring on Broadway in “Other Desert Cities,” said: “I was glad and shocked that Matthew wanted to work that hard. It really is our penance for taking the money in television. I’m a Roman Catholic, and he’s a Welsh Methodist. You must repent. Got to go kneel in the cathedral of the theater.” Mr. Rhys countered that it’s less about penance than love for the stage, from which he has been absent for seven years.

“Doing just the rehearsal process for the last few weeks, I’ve gone, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I’ve been away from this for so long.’ I could trot out a million clichés,” he said, “which would only disgust myself, but they’d be primarily about feeling alive. And it’s true.” A version of this article appears in print on January 22, 2012, on Page AR4 of the New York edition with the headline: Happy to Mine Hidden Charm In Youthful Anger. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe Broadway Buzz | Look Back in Anger - Off-Broadway | Broadway.com Look Back in Anger - Off-Broadway Matthew Rhys stars in John Osborne's classic drama. Tweet Look Back in Anger leading man Matthew Rhys will star opposite Keri Russell (TV’s Felicity) in the new FX drama pilot The Americans, according to Deadline.com. Created by Joe Weisberg and directed by Gavin O’Connor, the period drama will feature Rhys and Russell as a couple in an arranged marriage. No production dates have been announced. Set in suburban ...

Tweet Age & Hometown: “The same age as John Osborne when he wrote Look Back in Anger”; Vancouver, Canada Current Role: An off-Broadway debut as downtrodden housewife Alison Porter in the Roundabout Theatre Company revival of Look Back in Anger . A Wild Childhood: When four-year-old Goldberg made her stage debut in a preschool production of The Owl and the Pussycat ... View Photo Gallery... Matthew Rhys and company officially brought the tumultuous world of Look Back in Anger to life on their February 2 opening night. Set in 1950s England, the iconic John Osborne drama is the story of four friends who must fight to love one another in a cramped and filthy one-bedroom apartment. After taking their off-Broadway bows at the Laura Pels ... Tweet Matthew Rhys (TV’s Brothers & Sisters) makes a gritty New York stage debut in the Roundabout Theatre Company revival of Look Back in Anger , opening February 2 at off-Broadway’s Laura Pels Theatre. John Osborne’s British drama follows the tense relationship of Jimmy (Rhys) and his wife Allison ( Sarah Goldberg ) as they grapple with love and rage in a cramped London ...

Tweet The revival of John Osborne’s scorching drama Look Back in Anger opens February 2 at off-Broadway’s Laura Pels Theatre. Directed by Sam Gold, the Roundabout Theatre Company production stars Matthew Rhys , Sarah Goldberg , Adam Driver and Charlotte Parry. Set in 1950s England, Jimmy Porter (Rhys) lives with his wife Alison (Goldberg) and friend Cliff (Driver) in a filthy one-room flat ... Tweet As Jimmy Porter, the caustic, charismatic lead character in John Osbourne’s Look Back in Anger , Matthew Rhys is on constant alert, ready to lash out at his young wife, Alison (Sarah Goldberg), and a pair of interlopers in their garbage-strewn flat. For his New York stage debut, Rhys has abandoned the stylish suits he wore as gay lawyer Kevin Walker ... View Photo Gallery... Previews have officially begun for the off-Broadway revival of John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger , and we’ve got a first look at the scorching British drama.

The Roundabout Theatre Company production, which stars TV vet Matthew Rhys (Brothers & Sisters), Broadway alums Adam Driver and Charlotte Parry and West End favorite Sarah Goldberg, officially opens on February 2 ... Kenneth Haigh - IMDb IMDb Actor Kenneth Haigh is an English actor who made history originating the character of Jimmy Porter, the original "Angry Young Man", in John Osborne 's 1956 play Look Back in Anger (1959), a work that revolutionized the English theater. The following year, Haigh took the performance to Broadway, but movie star Richard Burton was cast in the 1959 movie ... See full bio » Born: a list of 916 people created 10 Feb 2011 a list of 59 people created 15 Jan 2016 a list of 367 people created 1 week ago Do you have a demo reel? Add it to your IMDbPage How much of Kenneth Haigh's work have you seen? User Polls 1996 The Ring (TV Movie) Dr.

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(TV Series) Personal Details Other Works: Stage: Appeared in Jean-Paul Sartre 's play, "Altona", at the Royal Court Theatre in London, England, with Claire Bloom , Basil Sydney , Diane Cilento , Nigel Stock and Julian Glover in the cast. John Berry was the director. Sean Kenny was the designer. See more » Height: Did You Know? Personal Quote: You need three things in the theatre - the play, the actors and the audience, and each must give something. Trivia: Set the precedent for British "angry young man" roles when he originated the part of "Jimmy Porter" on stage in "Look Back in Anger" in 1957. Richard Burton played the character in the 1959 film, Look Back in Anger (1959).

Star Sign: Look Back in Anger: Jimmy Porter as never seen before - Telegraph Look Back in Anger: Jimmy Porter as never seen before Punishing relationship: Jimmy Akingbola (Jimmy) and Laura dos Santos (Alison) in Look Back in Anger Charles Spencer 12:01AM BST 04 Jul 2008 Charles Spencer reviews Look Back in Anger at Jermyn St Theatre, London SW1 and Torn at the Arcola theatre, London We are all supposed to be colour-blind in the theatre these days, and certainly I now have no trouble in accepting English kings played by black actors in productions of Shakespeare's history plays, or indeed a black Lady of the Lake in Spamalot. We live in a multi-cultural society and our theatre should reflect the fact. However, I think the issue of colour-blind casting becomes more difficult with social-realistic plays set in the more recent past. In a revival of Pinter's The Homecoming (1965) at the Almeida earlier this year, the role of Ruth was played by the excellent black actress Jenny Jules but, despite her fine performance, the casting struck me as a mistake.

Pinter depicts a household dominated by a bigoted, bullying working-class old, white man. The idea of him welcoming a black woman into the household as a shared mistress for all the family struck me as about as likely as Alf Garnett cheerfully accepting a black man as his future son-in-law. The director Alexander Gilmour has now cast the black actor Jimmy Akingbola as Jimmy Porter in his revival of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. He has said that by casting a black performer he wanted to recapture the frisson of shock created by the play in 1956, with its disaffected working-class hero. Actually, what should be shocking about Jimmy Porter is neither his class nor his colour, but his rancour and cruelty. And though it is perfectly possible that a nice middle-class girl like Alison might have married a black graduate jazz musician in 1956, it seems ridiculous that, though everyone in the play talks about class, no one mentions race or colour. By casting a black actor as the anti-hero, Osborne's play has suddenly been burdened with an enormous and unnecessary elephant in the room.

Whatever the actor's colour, the only way this punishingly verbose and repetitive drama can inspire sympathy is if Jimmy Porter seems to be harming himself as much as those around him. Akingbola, whose ordinary English accent is intermittently replaced by an exaggerated West Indian one in moments of contempt or sarcasm, hasn't yet fully caught the role's self-lacerating intensity, though he sometimes comes close. Laura dos Santos suggests the suffering, if not the passive aggression, of his hapless wife and Simon Harrison proves a highly sympathetic Cliff. Gary Raymond, who played Cliff at both the Royal Court and in the 1958 film version of Look Back in Anger, now gives a deeply touching performance as Alison's strait-laced father Col Redfern, a man who feels painfully adrift in the modern world. It's not just whites who are guilty of racial prejudice, as Torn at the Arcola powerfully proves. Femi Oguns's play is a modern day Romeo and Juliet in which two young and successful black London lawyers fall in love, only to receive no end of grief from their families because one lot of relatives are of Jamaican descent, while the others come from Nigeria.

The Africans regard West Indians as feckless work-shy dope-smokers, the West Indians regard the Africans as corrupt witch-doctors who were complicit in the slave trade. Raz Shaw's production packs a powerful punch, but it's often hard to make sense of the street dialect and the script could do with a firm edit. The most poignant aspect of the production, however, is that it originally featured Brooke Kinsella as a white girl who went out only with black men because she liked "gangstas". The night after the press performance her 16-year-old brother Ben was knifed to death on the streets of Islington. Jermyn Street tickets: 020 7287 2875. Arcola tickets: 020 7503 1646

Question: Which play that premiered in 1956, featured the character Jimmy Porter?
Answer: LOOK BACK IN ANGER